


The Lights Go Down

by Imprise



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Developing Relationship, Emotional Hurt, Hurt Sherlock, M/M, Major Character Injury, Mental Instability, Mild Sexual Content, Minor Irene Adler/Sherlock Holmes, Permanent Injury, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-28
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-11-20 06:31:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11330418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Imprise/pseuds/Imprise
Summary: After an incident with Moriarty, Sherlock sustains an injury that strips him of important things. John deals with the loss in various ways as they grow used to each other again. Features a Sherlock without his mind and a John washed of solidness, self-centered and hammered apart.





	The Lights Go Down

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, once again this is more cerebral than anything, but it does have some plot for a change. I hope the thoughts and emotions will sound correct and imperfect and disconcerting so the work will have done some good.
> 
> The title is from the Electric Light Orchestra song.

“Do you want to go home yet?” Sherlock twists over himself to drink, brow furrowed. His legs are long and terrifically white against the dark lining of the sofa.

“I wouldn’t say so.” Her ankles are much thinner than his, although it would be difficult, she thinks, to tell whose look lovelier.

“That’s surprising,” he says. It feels like they’re going through the motions, as always, because when Irene finishes her one glass of dry red she’ll worry her teeth through her mouth. The man’s beautiful, she thinks, but he’s _simple_.

“Is it?” she asks mildly. Sherlock nods, a vague gesture, and rubs his foot against the cushions like an uncomfortable child. She speaks to him as if he were a child, sometimes, but still gives him wine, and once even bent down to pleasure the soft, heavy sag of his right earlobe. He reacted enthusiastically, she remembers, but even that had had a very odd, saccharine innocence about it. She hadn’t liked being with a man as slow as he had been, in the head, but very much enjoyed speaking to one, so they’ve kept up an unlikely attachment in which she comes and finds him in his decadent flat, and hammers him with words while he moves through various states of undress and drunkenness. They don’t touch, except when Irene curls her fingers through his hair, or when he’s fascinated enough with the pearly smoothness of the skin of her arm that he strokes it peculiarly for minutes on end.

“Lock the door after me, will you, Sherlock?” she reminds him patiently when enough has been said about her various dealings and disasters. Quiet and hedonistic, the man only mutters, and Irene leaves him picking idly at his fine sleeve, silhouetted beautifully against the wash of light from his large living-room window.

 

He paints, sometimes, using long wide strokes of the brush over large, white canvas, the colors burning into the back of his mind. Sherlock frowns sometimes, cocks his head, tries to really understand why they look that way, but it always evades him. And he doesn’t like frowning. So he stops.

“You’ve bought the wrong kind,” he whines, his voice so unnatural in the room that for a second he stops and thinks about what his life was like before this. The walls are also white. They’re as white as glass, really, which Sherlock remembers having cut himself on once, looking at the soft round face of a small small man –

The memory is sudden and barely recognizable. The man takes up Sherlock’s mind, all of Sherlock’s mind, which is larger and sharper than Sherlock ever remembers it being, because the man is lying right there with his mouth partly open and pain shoots through each nerve of his formidable body, unrelated to the shrapnel in his palms. He mouths a word, a nice round word, but he can’t remember what it is only the feeling of what it was and nothing else, he takes this face and bends his shoulders right over the man like a big cage, like a vulture.

When he comes back to himself Mycroft is also in the room. He understands that this is because he called out to him, but Mycroft is not explaining patiently about the paints, and he is not giving Sherlock the dull half-eye that he always gives him. Sherlock can’t figure out this particular expression, so he sits down cross-legged and looks up into Mycroft’s face. He doesn’t think he’s an exceptionally nice man, because Irene’s always been nicer, but Sherlock always gets what he likes from Mycroft in the end whereas Irene doesn’t stay when he wants her to. So Sherlock can settle for fewer smiles.

“What?” he says finally, petulantly. Mycroft tilts his head a little, obviously thinking, which Sherlock doesn’t see why he does so much of – it’s an exhausting activity.

“You were remembering a man,” he answers, in the careful style that Mycroft always answers. Sherlock doesn’t say anything back because Mycroft would have asked a question if he wanted that. But apparently Mycroft does want that, because he goes on tiredly afterwards: “How did you feel about it?”

Feelings, Sherlock realizes, are something he and Mycroft have never talked about. He’s never thought about feelings himself, although sometimes there is discomfort and agitation and confusion, and rarely there is pleasure, of which sexually Sherlock dimly remembers some activity during which he didn’t really feel present. Finally, he understands that he should be answering, so he says, “Yes. It was odd.”

“Odd?”

“I’d never seen that man before,” Sherlock explains patiently, “but I felt like I knew him.” He considers. “He felt very warm and very painful.”

“Painful?” Mycroft looks very interested, and Sherlock sees that this interest isn’t pleasurable mild interest, or encouraging teacherlike interest, but hard and tense and focused.

“He was dying,” Sherlock recalls. “Or something. I bent over him, you know, to stop the pain.”

“What happened then?” There is an unusual gleam to Mycroft’s eyes.

He looks at his brother’s left temple, shot gray with coming age. He has spent so long in here watching Mycroft or Irene or Mycroft that these things look sharp and specific to him, luminescent in a deep, thick water that feels like his brain shrinking over itself.“Then I died,” he says.

 

John Watson still lives in Baker Street. He still lives in Baker Street but Baker Street is a shrine. He has very neatly stacked each memory of Sherlock in a close corner and sometimes spends evenings staring at his pillar in remorse. He spends the rest of his time staring at it, too, but then he does it emotionlessly.

He is not working. He is still eating. He doesn’t want to treat people, and doesn’t feel smart enough to do anything else with his degree. The exertion of medical research, of research in which he is only a spectator, even, threatens to drown him. He cannot pick up a journal to skim the ugly print as he has done so often with Sherlock’s untidy limbs in some state of debauchery, tossed over the couch cushions or the chairs, not really judging John’s puttering-around as dull because it’s medicine. John is living off the funds of Sherlock’s brother, who comes over and stands to deliver his weekly Sherlock-report as if it were interesting. John supposes it is, sort of, interesting, or it really should be interesting, that his irascible flatmate has been reduced to a wide-eyed child without even the redeeming curiosity of a five-year-old. He supposes it should be interesting instead of unbearably painful. Sherlock Holmes, tall and knifelike of unearthly beauty, has lost his dignity and solemnity and towering intelligence to protect stout, useless John Watson. John wishes Sherlock was dead.

When Mycroft comes again it is Monday, the twelfth of February, as he makes a point to tell John each time. John stopped keeping track after the second of January, last year, and does not appreciate the reminder that he has been perfectly insulated from the world for thirteen months. When Mycroft comes this time, however, he leans heavily on a highbacked chair and says “He’s started to remember.”

“What?”

“You,” Mycroft says. He looks ill, but hopeful. John is unused to such an expression.

“What about me?” Excitement, the likes of which he has not felt in eons, pounds through his thoracic cavity. It is also unusual but not as unsettling as Mycroft and his modes of love.

“He remembers getting shot.” Mycroft, usually so tactful, is now sparing John no detail, and the rawness of it all makes him want to capsize again. “He thinks he died. I asked him why he thought so, and he said it was like burning the inside of his head, ‘with something really hot that made me go hot too.’”

“Mycroft,” John says, the warning in his tone flat and useless. He doesn’t want to hear these things. He wants Sherlock to be dead.

“I believe he will recover.”

“From a gunshot wound to the head? Mycroft,” John tries to keep his temper in check, but it’s a losing battle. He hasn’t expressed anything to this man over a year and he hasn’t expressed anything to anyone in years or whatever time has passed since Sherlock died. “Mycroft, he’s empty. He’s done. He used to have a brain and now it’s gone, Mycroft, and I don’t – I don’t know how –” He clutches his temples, right where he knows the bullet would have slammed into Sherlock’s hairline. “I can’t –”

“None of this is about you,” Mycroft says smoothly, so John can hear the edges of each word. “Do what you like, John. He’s – improving. And it means that – one day – he’ll know.”

“Know what?” The words push out of his mouth.

“That he was protecting you for a reason.” Mycroft moves to go, face set. “The same reason, I’d say, that you are shelved away here in quiet Baker Street, while he makes abstract art and gets fondled by Irene Adler in west London. Don’t make an idol out of my brother, Doctor Watson. He will never live up to it again.”

 

The memories grow closer together. Sometimes Sherlock sits primly in a small seat and realizes that this is not who he was before. Speaking with Irene is sharper and quicker; he notices more, the fall of her hair and how it was washed and the weird inflections she uses when she wants to switch course, none of which are as wonderfully clear as he somewhat recalls them being, but they exist. He realizes that he is missing something, a phantom body in itself, and is so overwhelmed with the missing-something at times that he can only fold himself into a square of limbs and stay like that, with his hands steepled at his forehead. Once, when Mycroft sees him doing so, something falls in his eyes like glass. Sherlock asks him about it then, and Mycroft responds, slowly, that it looks very familiar. It feels familiar to Sherlock as well. He spends time with the abrasions in his brain, which is an ugly process: He just wants to see him again.

“Who was it?”

Mycroft looks over at him. “The man?”

Sherlock nods, used to Mycroft’s helping prompts. This time, however, Mycroft doesn’t answer as quickly as he has when supplying Sherlock with all his other crucial bits of information. He stares at Sherlock’s face, then turns back to his other affairs with a queer stillness to his mouth. “I am certain,” he says, “that you know.”

Once, Sherlock would have pushed for more, both before and after the shot; before because he would refuse to be cowed by Mycroft and his meaningless complications, and after because he wouldn’t have realized why Mycroft wouldn’t tell him. Now he lets Mycroft go, his mind settling gingerly around the new puzzle with an odd sense of joy.

 

Irene is placing little touches on his wrists. Sherlock knows that this should be unfamiliar, all this physicality, but he is no longer the same person and understands simple gestures of affection. He also knows that this is not just affection, but neutrality, and their existence together with Irene is more of a mutual toleration in which he is treated and petted like a cat, an arrangement of surprising dullness that he vaguely enjoys. He likes feeling so obviously appreciated.

“I saw a gray man,” he says carefully, which is not enough to go on with that look in Irene’s eyes. “He was short and I lay on top of him before my head exploded. I also spoke to him before. I know I did and he looked up at me like I was very precious. Then on some other occasion we were together in a windowed room with nice dark wallpaper and he was angry, but I don’t know why. Who was this man.”

Irene says nothing, and then she holds his wrists fast and says “You loved him.”

“Did he love me back?”

“I don’t know. I think he did.” Irene seems to be thinking about something, but he can’t figure out what it is, so he asks “Where is he now?” as neutrally as possible.

“Very close to us,” Irene says.

Sherlock nods. “Can I see him?”

It is not Irene’s place to answer. But she says yes, because Sherlock looks a little less lost than he usually does, and Sherlock smiles a real huge smile which is not vacuous, so Irene thinks it is enough to see him do this. His face is a joy to look at. She brings him food, which he eats decently and without too much complaint, and then Irene calls Mycroft and tells him what she has done.

 

“I don’t want to see him.”

“You’ll have to,” Mycroft says, studying his fingernails.

“What if I refuse?”

“You already have. He’ll be round around six tomorrow. Do clean up.”

“You think this is a good idea?” John feels as if he has been sectioned and scrambled and each fissure is now dry and terrible. “What if he’s overwhelmed, being in here? What if he sees me and remembers how he used to be? What if – ”

“If he’s worse than what you’ve imagined him to be? Or better?” Mycroft raises an eyebrow. “What if he expects you to understand him? You will cope, John.”

“Will he be alright?” John can’t help asking. John is all parceled out and cannot tell anything from anything else, he has not set foot outside the flat for months. He still carries parts of Sherlock draped over him.

“I hope so,” is what Mycroft says. John has never heard him hope for anything.

 

John gets up. He sits back down. He stares. Sherlock has walked in and is now surveying the blinds with interest, John has installed weird blinds instead of his good curtains, Sherlock is watching the room with such idleness that John itches. His eyes meet John's, and he smiles a soft, vague smile, replaced quickly by a shadow of his old, intent look. 

"You're him," he says. John feels a pang at seeing Sherlock state the obvious, which he would never have tolerated before from anyone else.

"Yes," he says inconsequentially. 

"Did I use to live here?" Sherlock's fingers trail over the wall, then he clasps his hands primly in front of him. "You were angry with me here. You were sitting against a hard screen, except it wasn't the screen but the light that was sort of hard, it shone right into your face and sometimes mine and I ate something here. And I had my dressing gown."

John looks away at Sherlock's groaning ineloquence. "Yes," he says again. It occurs to him that he is being less luculent than Sherlock is, but Sherlock was a genius, so he supposes he would be higher-functioning anyway. He realizes for the first time that he does not actually know what Sherlock's problem is. A bullet has eaten through part of his brain, and this has happened because he wanted to protect John from bad people, and before his brother could intervene he was shot in the head. Now he is slowly improving after a long drought, but John has not taken the time to consider the real nature of this drought, and even now curses his hands for itching to take parts of Sherlock home with him. 

Sherlock, for his part, is home. He is perceiving things in a very new way, a keen sense of past awareness pervading his tunnel vision. He stands straight-backed and lonely close to the door, looking as if he has forgotten to sit down.

"So you paint," John attempts. Sherlock nods, smiling faintly. He is so formidable in height and face and he is smiling. "Colors," he says. John bobs his head.

"Can I live here?"

John pauses. "What?"

"Here," Sherlock repeats. "It feels good. Like I know it well. I want to stay with you here."

John wants to ask him for respite. He wants to call a break and take Sherlock in by increments, as if they were dating, and at one point perhaps allow him back his life again. But he has spent months considering, and the flat is Sherlock's flat as well, more so than John's, and John feels alarm at his all-consuming reluctance. He has all but ignored his flatmate for over a year for no fault but daring to love John openly. Chagrined, he says yes and moves over on the sofa so Sherlock might sit down, but Sherlock doesn't sit down, he just smiles like the sun.

 

Mycroft is neither pleased nor displeased and moves Sherlock's meager inventory in without comment. Irene, it is decided, will visit them at the flat sometimes, and Sherlock will putter off to hers when he wants to, and for this arrangement she and John suffer a tense introduction during which John wonders whether this woman has had sex with Sherlock, and Irene knows what he's wondering. Irritated and overwhelmed with all the people and changes he must now endure after such a long hiatus, John confronts Mycroft as to her presence and background; Mycroft rebuffs him with a few cool remarks about her importance as an "extragovernmental figure", which John takes to mean "state Moriarty". Later, he searches her name, and the images he finds convince him that the British government is completely and utterly deranged.

"Can we trust her?" he insists to Mycroft, who looks increasingly bored. Mycroft now shows some emotions to John, although John suspects them to be cleverly-manufactured expressions that indicate to him what Mycroft tires of stating.

"With what?" Mycroft asks. "Sherlock?"

"Yes," John presses. "A woman of her – caliber."

"I assure you, John, Sherlock was well cared-for by her during your voluminous absence. He is in no danger."

John takes the jibe in stride, because he figures he deserves it. "And – Moriarty?"  
"It is as I informed you that night, and twice after. He is now a nonentity." Mycroft seems to have lost all his tolerance for John now that he has to face Sherlock continuously, and John understands this is his due and does not stop Mycroft from leaving. 

His time with Sherlock is trying, but not bad. The infatuation has washed off his interactions with him, leaving behind a solid, burning understanding that John suspects is very likely to turn to affection. He is no longer treated to Sherlock's old, glazed facade, and must contend with the rest of him now opened to his hands, warm and solid like a stone. Sherlock's extremities are warm and solid but John feels the rest to be fragile and young, so he does his utter best to be delicate, but he has grown very rusty. This is not a love he is familiar with.

 

It is easy to perform for John, who is unassuming at best and detached even at their most intimate. Sherlock navigates the minutiae of their interactions with unparalleled skill because John is so responsive, not in word or demeanor but in the little flicks of his eyes. He mines information out of him by his reactions to each small word; _not good_ makes his eyelid stutter, for instance, and when Sherlock first said his name John had tensed jaw-to-hip with indefinable terror. He doesn’t do that as often now, because Sherlock loves saying his name so much, and he realizes he has become bland and soft and dull, really, but John is willing to ignore this all the time. Sometimes he feels a keening sorrow at the distant understanding that he has lost something spectacular. He sees that this is what keeps John from looking into his eyes.

“You hate me.”

John turns around with a peculiar frown, letting his weight sag onto one elbow on the table. “What?”

“You,” Sherlock repeats, “hate me.” He, himself, hates that he has had to repeat it, when he knows – he feels, like something that has been cut out of him – he knows that there would have been a time for him to say a million things, to fill each minute with words as clever as gemstones. Now he has none of them.

“Sherlock,” John says in mild confusion, “Sherlock, I don’t hate you.” It is obvious that he is saying this because he thinks it is one of Sherlock’s dumb delusions. He may have had many of these, but Sherlock likes to think that while he is blunted, he is not inaccurate, as he was not at the worst of times – he was just slow, and insulated, and interested in nice tactile things. This is plain fact, written clearly on John’s features – contempt, and pity, and a delicate effort to be as firmly accomodating as possible.

“Yes, you do,” he says, hating how stupid it sounds. “You hate me because I’m not like I was. It’s okay, I understand,” he adds. “I hate me too.”

“ _Sherlock,_ ” John says, and Sherlock wonders if he is stupid as well, as his name really doesn’t have to be said so many times in one conversation. “That’s – ”

“I know I’m boring,” he goes on. “I feel it, sometimes, a gap where I know I once could have said or known or done something. And I can’t do it. My brain stops. I know that you used to like me for being clever, and sharp, and cold, and now I’m all round and fuzzy, I’m slow. I remind you of what I once was and you suffer, because each day I cannot do what I – I cannot be as remarkable.” He realizes he has talked for a long time, and internally prides himself on it. John looks old and sad.

“That is unusually perceptive of you,” he says finally. “You haven’t – lost your touch.”

Sherlock understands that this is a confirmation of what he has stated. Despite his prior knowledge of these facts, he feels an inexplicable sadness.

“How do you know I liked those things? How could you remember what you – were like?”

“I read your blog,” Sherlock answers mechanically.

“Oh, _Sherlock_ ,” John whispers, looking agonized. His fingers on the tabletop go still. “I’m so sorry you had to see that.”

“I didn’t have to do anything.”

“You shouldn’t have anyway.”

“I would have known either way. I would have known the same way I knew you existed before I knew your name. You itched like a separate lost person.” Sherlock rattles this off very quickly and knows it doesn’t make sense, but he is a shell of what he once was and is therefore entitled to questionable logic bridges.

John looks uncomfortable. Sherlock takes this as his cue to leave. He doesn’t want to look at John anymore.

“Wait,” John says suddenly. Sherlock turns. John has risen from his seat, face white and rigid. Sherlock’s mind is again very blank.

“It was brilliant,” John says, “what you just did.”

“Thank you,” Sherlock smiles. He likes being appreciated.

“But it was wrong,” John goes on. “I don’t hate you, Sherlock. I love you. I – love you, more than I can bear under the circumstances.”

“I don’t understand,” Sherlock says. Love for Mycroft is distant interference. Irene doesn’t love him, but her parcels of intimacy are good and gentle. It is difficult to reconcile this data with John’s tight-jawed avoidance, which is so perfectly categorical that Sherlock has taken it for contempt, or with his obvious pain.

“I have never loved anyone like you,” John says, looking into Sherlock’s eyes for what seems like the first time in ages. “You gave up the most precious thing in the world for me, but I loved you before that. I loved you enough to kill for you, to die for you, to endure exasperating solitude because that was who you were. And then,” he grits his teeth, un-grits his teeth, looks at the floor, looks at his face, “then you did me one better and actually got yourself shot for me, protecting me.” He lifts his gaze from a nearby clock and fixes it onto Sherlock’s, and Sherlock sees with some surprise that John is livid, his hands trembling with thinning control. “How could you do it, Sherlock?” he asks terribly. “How could you do this – for me? You thought it was for me, but Sherlock,” he looks at the wall, “I would rather be dead a thousand times over if it meant you were still here like you were, like you used to be here. Not because you were brilliant, although that was part of it – not only because you’re a genius, and you help people, and are a better – a better thing than I ever was, or could ever be. No, Sherlock, I wanted you to live because I love you, and I would give up suns and nights for you so you would go on doing what you did. I would go back and change things so I’d never have met you if it meant you would’ve survived it all. And yes, I know you did survive.” He makes an effort to look at Sherlock. Sherlock feels weird. “But I loved you so much I didn’t want you to, like this. I loved you then and I love you now. I was terribly afraid that I’d love you now. And God, Sherlock, I do.”

“Why were you afraid?”

“Because I knew,” John says with difficulty, “that each day I saw you I would remember Sherlock Holmes as he was, and each day I would know that that Sherlock Holmes loved me and I never did anything, I never reached out to him, and then he tried to die for me. And I couldn’t even blame this Sherlock Holmes, because I would love you too, and see you knowing what you used to be, and not being able to be that person again, and I thought seeing that would kill me because I loved you.”

“I still remember why I did that,” Sherlock confesses.

John blinks. He has spoken for a long time and the adrenaline dims out in his flat veins. “Why?”

“I knew I couldn’t do what I could do,” Sherlock explains, “if you weren’t there.”

John is staring. John is leaving the room. John is coming back. John is kissing him, and kissing him, and feeling like he is violating the privacy of an invalid, which hurts Sherlock. John is feeling like he is taking advantage of Sherlock, which is very disturbing, so Sherlock does his best to respond although it’s difficult because he hasn’t kissed anyone that he remembers and he doesn’t remember ever really liking semisexual touches.

“I know I should have asked you if you were alright with this,” John says, pulling back. What John is really thinking is that he didn’t ask because he wasn’t sure if Sherlock could give a considered answer. He is uncertain whether this was a justified concern, or whether he just likes to oversimplify Sherlock’s condition in his head for convenience, or self-preservation. Sherlock hasn’t deduced any of this thinking, and now is shaking his head at John in confusion, saying he has already told him that the older, more active, more human him would have wanted to kiss John very much. That version, they both know, would be very different within the kiss. He would be cataloguing, John knows, or just feeling, Sherlock knows, and he would be present and dominant and passive and terrible, and John would laugh into his mouth at some point out of urgency and joy. This Sherlock tolerates, which John should suppose is enough.

“At least it’s a mild toleration,” Sherlock encourages him. “It’s not bad, or anything. It’s different. I like it.”

“That’s all right,” John says. He feels like a sandbag and cannot move his heart. “We’ll leave the kissing for some other time.”

“Soon,” – Sherlock wants it to be soon, because it did feel sort of nice, but in an isolated way. He doesn’t want to be treated like a child, which is how John actually thinks of him at times. It bothers him to be desexualized, but he can’t pinpoint this bother quite exactly as of yet.

“I love you,” John says, but he’s not looking at Sherlock as he says it, so Sherlock has a very keen sense that he is speaking to another someone who is not present. There are so many things that they are not saying. John is living the crushing disappointment of having fulfilled a longtime desire, only to find that it wasn’t how it should have been and now can never be as he has wanted it to be. He is torn between resentment, surprise and frustration at this turn of events, and feels that he has attempted to fish out parts of the old Sherlock from this new, crusty husk of his semilover. He misses the life in old Sherlock untellably. New Sherlock knows that all is not right, and that John intends never to really touch him again because of reasons unknown (which are, in reality, that John is scared of disappointment folding back over him, and he is scared that his desires have been twisted into a new, unresponsive package that looks, but never feels all right) and now, knowing that John loves him, and that he wanted to touch his old self, and that Sherlock is not as contemptible as he thought he was, he resolves to get John to stop treating him as if he were fragile. He intends this to involve kissing.

    
It barely involves any kissing at all. John is very careful and he is not as careful. John is very taken to wearing ugly shirts as he sleeps, so Sherlock has become partial to buttoning him out of them. The first time he did so John asked him where he got off, and when Sherlock looked at his face he let him do as he liked. That hurt, Sherlock thinks, because he senses that John stopped protesting simply because he thought Sherlock was too stupid to be entertained any other way, like a baby with a very loud rattle, and now John is barely tolerating him out of slim superiority. John has not allowed him to continue for this reason only. John lets him open up as many button-downs as he fancies, because old Sherlock would never in a thousand years have done it this way, and John still finds the act damnably interesting. He no longer concerns himself with using Sherlock, who obviously does as he pleases, and has resigned himself to reaping various rewards from being in the presence of his old friend and his addled brains. He spends most of his time reflecting on this situation, and this conclusion is the best he has reached. He wishes Sherlock were here, so that – in the wildly unlikely event that John would ever have confided in him – he could have ripped apart societal values and the sense of propriety and interpersonal boundaries with one long, elegantly-delivered speech of dismissal, and John would have pled exasperation and scorned his amorality but he would have still loved it anyway. This Sherlock, he sees, still has that sense of acquisitiveness and obliviousness to the rules of his earth, but it is more innocent and self-centered on a smaller scale. Sometimes John thinks Sherlock should have grown shorter since his injury, because it's frankly incogruous with his size and beauty for him to be so ordinary. He knows old Sherlock's skin would curl clean off his body if he knew what had happened to him.

He expresses this opinion to Irene, someday. It pops out without warning. Irene has taken to being present around the flat, in no small part due to the fact that John and his benign smiles are abhorrent in the role of caretaker. She fixes him with the most intense stare he's experienced since Mycroft told him Sherlock was coming back, and he realizes he misses this force-field of intelligence incredibly.

"He wouldn't have minded like you think he would," she says finally, still watching John's face. "He knew what could happen, John. He wanted to protect you, and you're alive. I don't think he would have minded."

"He thought he’d die," John argues. The guilt of years sags heavily in the pit of his stomach. "Not – not this,"

"He got what he wanted," Irene says, voice sharp. "The rest is irrelevant."

"Irrelevant?" The word stretches out of John's mouth with much of his anger. "Sherlock Holmes – "

"– is alive and here, no matter how much you wish he wasn't," Irene snaps. The roses she has brought are wilting, slightly, in their container by the sun. This is because the sun has turned bland and discomforting and razes the flower-skins instead of homing inside them. "It's been long enough, John. I know you treat him like an infant, but it's you who's behaving like one. You chose your idealized version of Sherlock over what he became for you, and left him alone to suffer for months while you pined over a memory. Now, all you do is compare what he is to what he was, and tamp down contempt when he can't compete."

“How do you know all this?” John says, suddenly agitated. He falls silent for a second, realizing his admission, then attempts to get himself together again. "You think I don't know?"

"I think you excuse it by wheedling on about how miserable you are, and how irrevocable Sherlock's condition is, and how you should have died or he should have died, and it's tiring. Sherlock is here to be loved, and after what has been taken from him – what he gave up, for love – he has not much else to do. He cannot handle too much, as he could not before, but he will focus much more directly on expressions of affection, and finds it wonderful to be acknowledged."

"Whatever I do will be unhealthy to him. I will never stop grieving what he was."

"You are acting like a spoiled child," Irene says. "Fall in love with him again if you must. It really cannot be difficult. He is still remarkably lovely."

"And what if I can't?"

"You were his friend and you were companionable to him. He adored you." Irene flicks a glance towards Sherlock's door, shut tight, and turns back to John. "Be a friend if you cannot be his lover. I would say you should leave if it is all too difficult for you. But God, John, I would never forgive you if you ran away from this.” She is addressing him like an old acquaintance, and John is hit with the strong sensation that in some other time, some distant place, they have met and clashed just like this, like plains animals with tusks and teeth bared in the hot sun over the blue pile of Sherlock’s bones and body. Her nose is distinctively female. “You do not have the luxury to leave him as he is. You do, however, have the agency to adapt."

"I don't know if I can adapt."

"Bury Sherlock Holmes," Irene says, gathering up her keys and coat in quick, hard motions. "And then come back to Sherlock for Sherlock, because he deserves it. Because, after all this time," she heads for the door, "it’s no longer really a matter of love."

 

John places his saucer carefully on the table, he places his cup carefully on the table, he stacks them up very neatly and looks back at his companion. Sherlock is not feeling well in the head. He has curled into a ball on the far end of the couch and does not speak when addressed; John is having a hard time feeding him. 

Irene arrives, serene and luminous. She scatters her things all over the flat, which John has figured out she does to comfort Sherlock, and settles next to him on the sofa to touch the sole of his foot. Sherlock is unresponsive.

"Are you thinking of leaving?" she asks, mouth quirked into a small smile. Sherlock, taking no offense at this, turns a little to face her. 

"I'm slouching," he says at last. "Inside my brain."

"Is that good or bad?"

"I don't know. It's new." Sherlock goes quiet again. Irene gathers her things after a while spent talking aimlessly with John, which they have become grudgingly adept at, and leaves. 

The night slinks over them. At first John does not interfere with Sherlock’s brooding, he does unremarkable things and resents himself, but the time comes when he cannot ignore anything any longer because he simply can’t, his body won’t stop wanting to do things and he, himself, can’t stop wanting them to be good. He busies himself with comforting Sherlock, and once the menial tasks are finished he brushes a thumb or two over Sherlock’s warm forehead. Sherlock shies away from the touch, and John is irresistibly reminded once again of a newborn foal as he looks at him. Even his skin is softer, thinner from months kept inside. 

"Sh," he says. "It's alright." His doctorliness overrides everything else. Sherlock is stretched flat on his stomach on his bed, manouevred there by John from his slouch on the sofa, a move that was very awkward and has left them very stilted. Sherlock seems to suspect something very undesirable on the horizon, which John wishes he could say he never has brought around, but it would be a rather big lie, he thinks.

"Calm down," he says in the same tone. "And give me your hand."

Hesitant, Sherlock offers him a pale, peaked wrist. John rolls it between his palms, wide and salty, and presses very lightly on each side. He moves the touch very slowly, never ghosting over Sherlock's body, always at a constant, reassuring pressure that feels like it flows through him into his friend. The lights are on. Sherlock relaxes.

"That's alright," John repeats. "It's okay."

He nods. From a certain angle John's face looks very round to Sherlock, which he supposes he must have once found attractive, but the thought is quickly replaced by an indescribable certainty that old Sherlock did not think of John's face at all, he thought of John. Sherlock does his best to look past the chin and the mushed nose and forehead lines, and all he comes up against is a sparse, sustained coldness. Confused by this insight, he pushes against John's body.

"Alone," he says. "Give me some time." His voice sounds like that of a man's.

John nods as if this is natural and leaves, but he pulls a little on Sherlock's hair as he does so. Wondering slightly, Sherlock stays where he is. He thinks that if he liked John before and he likes him now, John – he doesn't know what has happened. John is not pretty, except when Sherlock gets used to his face, whereupon it becomes rather nice-looking in a homey, old-timey sort of way. John, as a person, is not pretty either: Sherlock supposes he used to be kind and good or something, but now he's self-absorbed and erratic with a weird, infernal resentment. Sherlock realizes for the first time that John might not actually be completely sane.

"Yes," he says out loud. The room feels fuller as the word reverberates, growing, growing, through the walls and his retinae. He has realized that he and John once loved each other, but this love has festered inside John and become untenably volatile in him. He can barely detect scraps and shards of it when John turns, when he says something ordinary, and supposes it shattered somewhere when he was shot, like a fragile purse stashed somewhere cranial. When John shows affection he shies away because, he understands, John is not showing affection: He is demonstrating a sort of peculiar tolerance for the creature Sherlock now is, crushing down fury and inadequacy as he does his best to be appealing. Sherlock, on the other hand, feels nothing for no one, but they continue their farce based on a half-acted and fully unspoken commitment that neither can truly bear. Having realized all this, Sherlock gets up and walks into the sitting room. John is holding a rather neurotic pose by the window, head fixed on his neck out the panes, rigidly staring into the street with a sort of corrosive awareness. Sherlock makes sure to stand at a safe distance.

"I don't think it's good for me to be living here," he announces. 

John’s tone is measured. "What?"

Sherlock explains his epiphany in the simplest terms possible, remembering that he once thought John unutterably slow. "We're not good for each other," he concludes. "I want to see you, but I don't need love – I don't need you to try and desire me –"

"I do desire you." The words are clipped.

"Yes, maybe," Sherlock concedes. His arteries look positively exquisite with the neck of his robe tugged low at is. He knows he has always been delicious, but John seems to have taken badly to his new openness to touching, the notion of an approachable Sherlock disturbingly alien to him. "I do not mind seeing you again. But later." He casts around for better, heavier words. “Later.”

"You can't leave," John whispers.

"What?"

He realizes that must have sounded pathetic, or threatening, or both. "I mean you shouldn't leave Baker Street," he explains. "You've been away long enough as it is. I'll find someplace else to sleep."

"Do you have money?"

"Yes," John lies. Mycroft will handle it, he's sure. If not, he thinks the streets will be a good change. He thinks of gravel. It could bite into his cheeks and crawl into his jumpers as he scrubs and scrubs his skin over the walls, leaving traces of himself scattered through London, London carried onto his rawline body. He knows these thoughts are utterly unwholesome and stops because he feels them to be undoctorly.

Sherlock seems bothered by the whole affair, but he doesn't argue when John packs. When John leaves he is sitting on the sofa watching the dented wall. The flat feels cleaner.

 

Each time they see one another it is Odd in all senses of the word. Once, very inadvisably, John lets his hand wander over Sherlock’s nipple as they sit together, as Sherlock tries desperately to look through John’s forehead into his brain and John notes with pleasure that he no longer calls the man before him New Sherlock in his head. Sherlock’s lips part and his brow furrows, and he says, distinctly, “You’re not going to let up until we have sex.”

With a jolt John withdraws. “I – sorry?”

“You keep thinking about it,” Sherlock says, eyes light as grass on John’s. “It’s clogging everything up.”

“I think about it, yes,” John says, deciding not to avoid the obvious. “But I – you have to know, I’d never – ”

“Why?”

“Because it’s wrong,” he insists. “It’s like you’re, you know,” he struggles to find the right words. “It feels predatory. I feel wrong when I think about it.”

“Did you always feel wrong about it?” Sherlock looks so incredibly mild that John finds part of himself deciding with absolute certainty that he must have had sex with Irene. There is no other way that he could be this neutral, or so deftly tread this line between shuttered and permissive. John thinks he will ask Irene, whom he finds he is reluctantly coming to trust, but he will only ask her once he’s certain he won’t hate her for it.

“A bit,” he admits, “but for other reasons.”

“Why?” Sherlock seems so honestly confused.

“Because you were my friend,” John says painstakingly. “And you weren’t interested. And now you’re my friend and you can’t be interested, you understand, you can’t just – and then there’s the balance of power –”

“Power?” Keen understanding flashes over Sherlock’s face. “Is that what you find in – John,” he says, “you’re afraid you won’t know which one of us is doing what, aren’t you? You’re afraid that you’ll be pitying me, or I’ll be pitying you, or that I’ll be vulnerable –”

John feels overwhelmed with Sherlock’s acuity. This is insight into human nature that he can’t imagine old Sherlock ever possessing, but apparently he did possess it, stowed into some remote corner of his brain where it would be stifled by intellectualisms. “That,” he begins.

“That is how you see it.” Sherlock’s tone brooks no argument, and John can’t get around to making any. “I will not have sex with you if you see it that way.”

“I still care for you,” John says, each word difficult. He has just been struck with a horrible fear that this is it, that Sherlock has turned away for good, the direct statement eating into him. “I can touch you without sexualizing it. I won’t always see things that way. Sherlock, I still care,”

“I know,” he says. He is looking at John in minor consternation. “Try if you like. I don’t need for you to show me affection, like Irene says you should. Not if it’s not honest.”

“Sometimes it is honest.”

“Okay,” Sherlock agrees. John lets the matter drop.

Another time, rather more advisably, they discuss the possibility of John spending another night over. John has recently been confined to a bedsit much like the first, Mycroft not having felt particularly lavish with his living arrangements, which suits him just fine. But time with Sherlock is getting more comfortable; they don’t just orbit each other like foreigners, they eat and watch television and even chat with Mrs. Hudson sometimes, who has understood that things are transforming in the flat above her and very rarely drops in. It is Sherlock who makes the overture, and John stomps up the stairs to find fresh sheets for his bed, and he eats breakfast the next day in the presence of large, white ex-detective idling in the chair opposite. The thick, stinking fog in John’s movements slowly clears away as he has his toast under a morning that crawls in through the shutters and crawls into the seams of his coarse coarse mouth, his body going softer and softer as the night fades out. He associates a lot of things with light, he knows, he watches Sherlock very often and in various shades of darkness. He likes how it fills out Sherlock’s face, when the dark is water-thin and only just smeared around a fleshed-out halo of golden light. He loves his friend so dearly that it plays down onto his heart-strings when the sun flashes into his eyes like this. He knows as he eats his toast that he loves his friend all the time, but this love is difficult to distill properly from all the other good things in his life. Like Sherlock being alive. When he realizes this, he puts his toast down and plants a kiss on Sherlock’s clearwater forehead, bending down in benediction as the man closes his eyes in trust.

 

But then they fight. John never thought they would but they do fight and it, he thinks, is terrible, and he thinks this the first time it happens with the sheer ferocity of their middle age. He thinks this in the context of knowing-each-other, of being-together, as in early days Sherlock would simply test John’s tolerance by projecting parts of himself out to be stoned, and John would complain about some useless things – like grocery shopping – and deliberately not complain about other, similar things, perhaps to demonstrate his appropriateness as a companion to him. Each time Sherlock pulled out something new John would be stoically disapproving, or admiring, or sometimes the things pulled out would be so irrationally precious that he would act like someone good, like the John Watson Sherlock needed. This fight is very young, it is very vulnerable, and they have known each other stripped down to such a degree now that John finds their acquaintance aged. It is not a very meaningful thing to do, he knows, but as Sherlock stares at him in irritation he gets down on his knees and leans his throat against the cool edge of the table, and as Sherlock speaks in growing frustration he closes his eyes in Morse like lanterns and opens them to get his voice back into his throat. Sherlock demands to know if he’s gone mad. John blinks so his pupils twinkle in the coming dusk, flashing on and off like stars. He gets back up and walks over to Sherlock’s bedroom, having shed all propriety when he yelled at Sherlock to quit it or shut up already, to make sense for a change, and when in a bid for self-preservation he said very loudly _I can’t stand you_ because he knew terribly that he couldn’t shake Sherlock ever again, ever out of his goose-swollen heart. Sherlock had looked hurt for a moment, and then his face had smoothed out in a way so characteristically Holmes that John had ached through the thick ends of his bones, wanting to do him better. He knows now that he will have to explain his oddness to Sherlock later, but for the moment he has acted so unfathomably that it seems like it would somehow be better to draw away from him for a second, or two seconds, which both feel long. Sherlock putters around in the living room for a while as John introduces the side of his face to Sherlock’s bedcovers; when it feels like he has been there for hours, he comes to lean against the doorframe with an inscrutable expression. John knows that if he pretends to be sleeping it will be the wrong thing to do, so he pricks up his head like a disturbed animal. After a minute or so, Sherlock turns in to sit at his desk, and they settle in for the night.

 

"Babe," he says. It sounds weird and inappropriate to Sherlock being Sherlock, so he stops. "Sherlock," he tries again. "Come here."

The man appears to be wary, his body coiled the other way. "I don't need a sympathy fuck, John."

"I'm not going to give you one. I'm sorry I said that, I'm bad with endearments. I just – come here."

Sherlock looks suspicious, and vulnerable, but he crawls over the bed and into John's arms. With surprise, John realizes that this feels okay. It feels right, better than any halfhearted attempt he's managed, and he can detect the smallest and most gorgeous things he had missed before, like how Sherlock still peers into his eyes. It is no longer the floodlight it was, but his gaze is still wonderfully incisive. John is overwhelmed with relief that now he no longer has to only find Sherlock pretty; at this distance, Sherlock is also complex and touchable in a different way than his many come-hither permutations.

"Comfortable?" he asks. When Sherlock nods, he slots a hand around the back of his neck and presses, humming slightly. It is unfamiliar, but correct, and he is humming out of pleasantness. Sherlock also seems to be feeling the same, because he shifts in bed to give John better access and rubs his curls over John's chest in a form of closeness. John is relieved he hasn't tried this before, lest he have ruined something so startlingly companionable.

"Would he have done this?" Sherlock asks finally. John knows he's talking about himself.

"Maybe," he answers truthfully. "To be honest it's very hard to tell. He was never the most demonstrative, but I think he would have enjoyed something like this, and wouldn't have had to trivialize it out of confusion."

Sherlock is quiet for so long that John thinks he's sleeping. At last, he says, "You should tell me about him."

John finds this unexpected. "Now?"

"When you think about him. When I ask. You should tell me so it's not just yours anymore."

"I don't want you to be upset," John says carefully. He still thinks very often of Sherlock Holmes.

"He's mine as well," Sherlock says. "If you're going to miss him, we can know him together. It's not fair for me not to really remember him."

"You don't?"

"Only in feelings that aren't there," Sherlock explains cautiously. "Or things I know I've seen before. Your eyes are always very familiar. I think I spent a long while looking at them."

"I'll tell you," John says a few minutes later, turning his head to face the window. In pours the light of dawn, red as pomegranate juice, painting Sherlock's cheekbones alien. "I will."

 

*

 

The drive home is a good push push push through John’s lumbar curve. It is a flitting-between the golden pools of street-lanterns, the thrum of the car a very old memory that he only once enjoyed, carousing through the countryside at sixteen in myriad forbidden getaways. Even before he was a shut-in John did not drive, he paid unreal amounts for cabs and watched people’s nostrils flare and sink like jellyfish in the wan tube-light; this is Mrs. Hudson’s car and he is pleased that she has pushed him to take it out home. “Bring it back tomorrow,” she’s said, and John has heard all she has not said and taken it without complaint. He weaves in and out through patches of asphalt darkness where he is headed far away from home, which is far too close to be returned to, and only pulls in with a slick hiss when the night becomes flat with dust, the stars less like jewels as he slides the door behind him.

So he takes Sherlock one night and it's not the same night: Sherlock's Belstaff kisses the upholstery and his feet tap all over the flooring, and his elbow's in the window and his finger at his mouth, tapping and tapping the bruising of John's face. John's face is bruised because he did something a little unreasonable with a man in a suit in a pub in a fight, and came out with the wings of his jaw blotted with purple. The man had been reluctant to do anything but John was very tired, and he feels that after the two initial punches something bad left him through the ruptured veins of his cheek and mandible. This is why he now drives Sherlock out of the streets and out into the country and promises to buy Mrs. Hudson some gas, as his friend watches the nocturnal slip of the prairie, the bit-small parts in the grass, as they rush past him in a mute blur. John is very glad this is new Sherlock and wants to kiss him again, they haven't kissed since that original kiss and god he wants to kiss new Sherlock again, because he's watching it all with some sort of mild awe that old Sherlock could never have mustered for something like this. John has always been one for unassuming beauty. Sherlock's nose is flushed rose with cold.

It is cold because John has kept the inside of the car frosty, almost as if they are back in January with things crystalline before them, like Sherlock's hands, and his spun-glass cheekbones. April is not warm either, but John stops suddenly in the middle of nowhere and fishes Sherlock out of his seat where he seems melded to the coat and the door and the dark, and Sherlock doesn't ask many questions but his eyes are alive. John leaves the Belstaff behind specifically and notes that, even now, after spending so long inside, Sherlock goes out in tight shirts and tailored pants. He notes that Sherlock now leaves behind his suit-jacket, as if peeling off a useless shadow of his life. It feels much more appropriate, and once they have walked enough into the shortgrass he sits down somewhere indiscriminate.

"John?"  
"Come down," he says. Sherlock looks surprised, but he does so. "You can – put your head, on my lap, if you want. You know. Or – " His voice feels rough, sheathed in all the night in the car and the smooth shimmer of the city behind them. "Or put your back, like this, in my chest – "

"Why?"  
"I want to feel close to you," John states. Naked truths no longer feel painful to expose, and Sherlock seems to appreciate his honesty and does lean his spine, gingerly, against John's sternum. John fancies he can feel nervous transmission flitting up and down his vertebrae, and imagines for a second his blood replacing Sherlock's spinal fluid, golden and vibrant and irreplacably intimate. He imagines the thick, watery liquid pumping through his bruises and fingernails, the contusions turning pale as it seeps into them. "Darling," he says.

Sherlock considers this. "It doesn't sound right."

John pauses. He pauses. "Sherlock," he whispers. His chest and diaphragm hum into Sherlock's web of ribs, and Sherlock thinks every cell of his sacral skin is now attuned to the particular pitch of John's voice as he says the name, and addresses Sherlock as he is for the first time in eons. 

 

“Right now,” John says at Sherlock’s elbow, “you would be telling me what I’d been doing all day.”

He treats people now, a couple hours a day in some clinic Mycroft has easily found for him. There would have been a time when he would rue Mycroft’s interference, when he would do anything and everything to shake off the brotherly yoke and do things on his own for his own good. But John feels tired, and he sees no point in argument; he figures that he cannot spend all his time with Sherlock since they do not live together, and figures that the less time is spend dawdling in his bedsit the better, and uses his hours at the clinic as a short respite in which he gathers his thoughts and tries to clear his body. It is mostly for naught, as he thinks about Sherlock most of the day anyway, and now he has two versions of Sherlock to contemplate. He finds himself thinking of the more recent more often.

“Would I?” Sherlock ponders this. “How?”

“I don’t know,” John finds himself laughing. “You would look at my sleeves or collar or the mud on my shoes, or something, and tell me I would be developing a cold and that my third patient had heart disease.”

Sherlock wrinkles his nose a little. “That doesn’t sound very believable.”

“It wasn’t,” John agrees. “It was unbelievable.”

“So you loved it?”

“I loved it.” Sherlock is beautifully stretched out on the couch in one of his many poses of languor, but recently he seems to be preoccupied as he does so, pensiveness settling into the usual vacancy of his face. John wants to tell him that it’s alright, he still loves him, and he wants Sherlock’s realness to hatch in him again, as it had with the kitchen table along the hard line of his ribs and Sherlock’s eyes clear as glass. He remembers feeling irradiated from head to hip, the dim sunset glow of something barely familiar pressing kisses to his stomach lining. Then he takes hold of Sherlock’s curls and tugs, the heel of his hand digging into the ridge of his skull, and Sherlock pushes the back of his neck into John’s wrist and makes a noise that sounds good, and fair and certain. John pulls his hair well out of his skin, and Sherlock tips his head each way in tensile pleasure, and bites the pad of John’s thumb where it’s hanging loosely towards his mouth.

John sucks in a breath. Sherlock stops. John tugs harder on his hair and Sherlock’s lips fall open, closing tightly around his skin, the webbing of John’s hand, as John yields his entire left palm to Sherlock’s attentions. He realizes he is not very present in the moment, whereas Sherlock’s eyes are sharper than he has seen them for a long time. His canines drag over John’s skin in long, jagged burns. John groans. Sherlock turns his head to meet his eyes, damnfully lucid, and the look exchanged is clear and beautifully gray, and in the end John leans into kiss him, very gently – he is pressing his mouth against his. Then he sits down next to him, gathers his long legs into his lap, and proceeds to talk to him about useless things.

 

“Would I have done that?”

“I don’t know,” John answers honestly. It’s been about forty minutes, and he’s gotten warm and drowsy with so much limb on his body. “Like I said, you were always rather unpredictable. I think you might have, but only extremely urgently, if you’d thought I’d never manage anything on my own, or if we were dying together.” He scratches the back of his hand. “But then it wouldn’t have been so casual. You were always cold, but I think if it had been that dire it would have been more passionate and invasive than – what you just did. Maybe you would’ve done it in a really ordinary way, one evening when we were sitting like this together, and you would have met my eyes in your unusual manner of looking, I think, and I wouldn’t have been able to say anything. I would have loved you then, but been angry as well. We would never have spoken about it like we are now. But yes, I think you would have done it. Although I would never know why. I never knew what was going on in your head at any time.”

“Did you know I loved you?”

“I didn’t think you loved me even after you got shot for me,” John says honestly. “I’m very self-absorbed, Sherlock, and I’m rough and reclusive, and I can’t tell love apart on the best of days. But I’m tender at heart. I was always a little tender, here and there. I think you loved that best.”

“Really?”

“Perhaps tender isn’t the right word,” John reflects. “Stolidly caring is better. I am spindly sometimes, you know – although nowhere as spindly as you could be – but I am, and I’m irritable, and self-indulgent. I’m a bad writer. You told me that, and I sort of resented it. I’m sorry that everything I’m saying right now is about me, but I don’t know how else to go on, and I guess you would have said that it’s because I think of myself too often. But that’s something you’d never have said. Back then I wasn’t like this, I wasn’t so – cloistered, and wrong in the head. You would have called me dependable.”

“You aren’t now?”

 “I threw a fit not to see you when you just began to get better,” John says. He is refusing to look into Sherlock’s eyes. “I was very afraid. I am no longer the man I used to be.”

“Neither am I,” Sherlock says. John casts him a glance, startled.

“Things – go on,” he continues. “Stagnation would be quite dull.”

John keeps staring, then catches himself and looks away. “That,” he says, “is exactly what you would have said.”

“Hm.” Sherlock rubs his head over John’s chest like an overgrown housecat. “Is this bothering you?”

“I don’t want you to feel – inadequate,” John says. “I don’t want you to compensate for anything.”

“If I could compensate I’d still be the same person,” Sherlock replies, looking fondly up at his soft chin.

“You know what I mean.” John turns to face him. “You are not obliged to be anything other than Sherlock, now, and hang Sherlock Holmes if he’s simply not around. It’s frankly ridiculous that I’m mourning him when he’s right in front of me,” he says quietly. “Sherlock, it’s alright. Just do whatever you like. This is my problem that I’m dealing with – I don’t expect anything.”

Sherlock looks at him a little. “You’re still dealing with it.”

“Not as intensely. I –” John isn’t looking at him back. “I’m actually wondering if this affection, all this affection, is for you – or which you it’s for – I’m not very clever, emotions overwhelm me.”

“So you have changed. You feel for me.”

“I always felt for you. Now it’s unbearable.” John wants to transmit his love to Sherlock’s supine bone-marrow through thermal radiation, to make Sherlock’s innards boil until soft touchable things are left over. He loves Sherlock. He loves him. He does not think this will ever, ever change.

“Yes,” Sherlock says. He kisses John’s cheek. “Yes.”

**Author's Note:**

> What I wanted to do with this piece was to see if John and Sherlock could love each other even when divested of their essential characteristics, when John was no longer the kind-and-moral steady-state straight-edged Watson that, admittedly, the BBC also deviated from - and when Sherlock was no longer clever. I wasn't sure if it was going to work out at all, and I am not sure now whether anything has really been resolved; an epilogue might bring a little closure to the sprawl above, but we'll have to see when that'll happen.


End file.
